Review of Pacific Rim: Uprising (2018) by Mark U — 25 Mar 2018

It's been 10 years since the bridge between our world and the alien dimension was destroyed preventing anymore Kaiju invasions.

General Pentecost gave his life and now his son, Jake has become a street hustler wanting nothing to do with his father's legacy, these days he sells Jaeger parts for profit and after running into a junkyard tinkerer they're both given the chance to redeem themselves.

New Jaegar robots are commissioned with several new cadets piloting them yet a robotics corporation called Shao Industries wants to fully automate the Jaegers with remote controlled drones, of course not everyone is on board as they fear they can be hacked and infiltrated.

But the real trouble begins with a rogue Jaegar attacking and a human traitor has opened the bridge again letting in more ferocious Kaiju monsters to wreak havoc.

Newcomer John Boyega steals the show as Jake cracking jokes and acting a bit more sarcastic than his fellow cadet Lambert played by Scott Eastwood, Cailee Spaeny as Amani is the youthful spunky kid who can fix anything and looks out for herself since the end of the last giant attack, Newton and Gottlieb return as well learning more about the Kaiju evolving but the consequences about newer discoveries may be more troublesome.

With this movie as opposed to the last one the pacing is actually much better, you're not sitting around for an hour watching underwritten human characters be uninteresting, the action scenes are perfectly balanced and they are much more intense having multiple giant robots fight giant monsters, I gotta say too that the Kaiju monsters are way more fierce and advanced this time around, the twist also cleverly ties back to the first film.

Guillermo del Toro produces but new director Steven S. Deknight delivers way more of the thrills and fun from the first film, even if you dont emotionally connect with every single person the action scenes are still worth the price of admission and he paves the way for future stories with this universe.

This is a worthy follow-up and makes up for what was lacking last time.